News

What is the Value of TV Coverage?

Monday, 09 February 2015 @ 09:00

We’re big fans of the British GT Championship here at Element79. In recent years, SRO have done a fantastic job in elevating this series to become one of the UK’s top tier motorsport events. They have provided a great spectacle of seriously impressive GT car racing, supported by a very good race-day hospitality offering, including VIP fast laps and grid walks - all the stuff that race-day attending sponsors love. They have also provided a televised highlights agreement with Motors TV and Channel 4 to add to the attraction of the Championship package for series Partners.

For 2015, SRO have just announced an enhanced televised package, which will see the races televised live on Motors TV and SRO say that this will ‘undoubtedly add greater commercial value for the sponsors, teams and drivers’. While we would agree that for the sponsors and partners of the Championship this is a justified statement, for the sponsors of the teams and drivers, the benefits are not so clear and this is a common error that we see in a lot of sponsorship approaches.

Let’s look at what so many teams and drivers say in their sponsorship proposals. A common statement is to promote the fact that whatever championship that they are intending to run in is televised. Many sponsorship seekers will then state that this one fact enhances the value of the proposition to the sponsor to such a degree that televised coverage of the championship in itself will justify the considerable investment that they are seeking from the sponsor.

This is a very common misconception in sponsorship proposals and only demonstrates two things – that the team or driver seeking sponsorship has not taken the time to understand the needs of the prospective sponsor and worse still, that they have not identified exactly how that televised support can be properly used to really add value to the proposal. Assuming that the television cameras will regularly fall on your sponsor’s logo is woefully short of inadequate.